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Tuesday, March 30, 1999
By CHRIS ALLBRITTON
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
NEW YORK -- E-mail systems at thousands of companies and government agencies around the country were swamped yesterday by a cunning virus called "Melissa" that disguises itself as an "important message" from a friend.
The virus began to show up Friday and spread rapidly yesterday by making computers fire off dozens of infected e-mails. Although the virus apparently causes no permanent damage to a computer, its effects were far-reaching.
In Portland, Ore., city government slowed to a crawl. The e-mail network at Lockheed Martin, the aerospace company in Bethesda, Md., was overloaded.
Michael Vatis, a federal prosecutor and director of the National Infrastructure Protection Center based at FBI headquarters, said military and government computers were sabotaged, along with thousands of other institutions' systems.
To make matters worse, a similar virus called Papa was discovered yesterday. Papa is programmed to send out even more infected e-mails than Melissa, although it has a bug that sometimes prevents it from working, said Srivats Sampath, general manager of McAfee software, a company that makes antivirus software.
The Melissa virus comes in the form of an e-mail, usually containing the subject line "Important Message." It appears to be from a friend or colleague.
The body of the e-mail message says, "Here is that document you asked for . . . don't show it to anyone else" with a winking smiley face formed by the punctuation marks ;-).
Attached to the message is a document file. Once the user opens that file, the virus digs into the user's address book and sends infected documents to the first 50 addresses.
E-mails from the Papa virus include an attached spreadsheet file. When the user opens that file, the virus sends 60 infected e-mails.
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